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The Strokes are back. It’s been six years since The New Abnormal in 2020, and for anyone who tracks this band closely, that gap felt long — longer still if you spent the wait following Julian Casablancas into The Voidz. Then, out of nowhere, the lead single ‘Going Shopping’ landed. ‘Going Shopping’ isn’t the old Strokes sharpened up — it’s the band watching the noise of the moment through a thin film, and updating the distance rather than chasing the fire. That’s what this piece is here to unpack.
Key facts
- ‘Going Shopping’ is the lead single from The Strokes’ seventh studio album Reality Awaits, released on April 7, 2026.
- Reality Awaits was recorded in Costa Rica with producer Rick Rubin and finished in various locations around the world.
- It’s the band’s first new material since 2020’s The New Abnormal.
- The album runs 41:02 across 9 new tracks, out on RCA/Cult, produced by Rick Rubin.
- A second single, ‘Falling out of Love,’ followed on May 13, 2026.
- Six years is a long time to wait for a Strokes single
- Costa Rica, Rick Rubin, and a room full of air
- Auto-Tune and the fog of consumer life
- Where this sits vs. Angles, Comedown Machine, and The Voidz
- How it actually gets listened to
- Where it sits on Reality Awaits
- How do you listen to a song people disagree about?
- What to listen for, and where to go next
- The wider frame — 2000s NYC rock, twenty-five years on
- Closing — an update in distance, not a return to fire
- Related reading
Six years is a long time to wait for a Strokes single
Start with the clock. Waiting on a new Strokes song has been a decade-long condition at this point. Reality Awaits is their first new music since the well-received New Abnormal in 2020. In between, Casablancas kept The Voidz moving, the other members had their own things going, and the band wasn’t exactly frozen — but as far as new songs went, the update line was blank.
So when the track hit streaming platforms on the morning of April 7, timelines went a little weird. Excitement and suspicion, both at once. I’ll be honest — the first thirty seconds didn’t tell me what to think. If you show up expecting the angular guitars of Is This It, you’re going to feel a small letdown. A few plays in, though, it’s clearly aiming somewhere else. That’s the pivot.
NME framed the six-year gap with a mix of sarcasm and relief — noting that The Strokes could have just kept touring the first three records forever, and the fact that they didn’t is worth something. That reading gets at where this band actually sits. They didn’t set up camp on the past. They took six years and came back with a song that quite obviously does not sound like the past. That choice, by itself, is a big part of the backdrop for ‘Going Shopping.’
Costa Rica, Rick Rubin, and a room full of air
The setup around this record is interesting on its own. Reality Awaits was tracked in Costa Rica with Rick Rubin and finished at studios across the world. It’s Rubin’s first time working with the band, and that pairing alone was news.
Anyone who knows Rubin’s habits knows he’s a subtraction guy. He pulls ornament out and leaves the temperature of the playing exposed. You can hear traces of that on ‘Going Shopping.’ The guitar layers are thin. There’s real air between the parts. The drums don’t punch forward — they sit in the room, natural. And yet the vocal treatment (more on that in a second) goes the opposite direction, toward addition. That imbalance is where the song’s odd sense of distance comes from.
Costa Rica is a fun detail too. A band born in New York, still carrying Manhattan air on their records through Room on Fire and beyond, tracked this one in Central American humidity and light. The Crimson’s review picked up on it: the track rides a relaxed mid-tempo groove, guitars clean but slightly muted, less sharp than the early work and closer to the polished feel of The New Abnormal. That “clean but muted” quality doesn’t feel unrelated to where it was recorded.
Auto-Tune and the fog of consumer life
You can’t talk about this song without talking about the vocal. Casablancas pushed Auto-Tune and pitch correction clearly to the front, and the reaction has been split down the middle. NME described it as the New York rock veterans introducing their seventh album Reality Awaits through the lens of retail therapy, with divisive Auto-Tune, clean guitars, and occasional sparks of energy.
How you take that treatment basically changes the song. On the critical side, there’s a read that pitch correction doesn’t add an unreal layer above the vocal so much as it flattens the phrasing and grain, taking away the very thing that made following Casablancas’ performance interesting in the first place. I get that argument. Early Casablancas was all in the rasp. Smooth that out and yes, something goes missing.
But there’s another angle. The Crimson read the hook — that repeating “I can’t wait, I’m goin’ shoppin'” line — as deliberately empty, almost satirical, a mantra the narrator both believes and hates. If that’s what the song is about, then flattening the voice into something processed and mask-like actually matches the theme. A consumer mantra chanted in a voice stripped of body heat. As a device, it holds together.
Atwood Magazine landed on the more favorable side — calling it a tight, kinetic piece of indie rock built on a loose, easy groove, leaning into what The Strokes have always been good at while quietly pushing the edges. That phrase, quietly pushing the edges, is the important one. This isn’t a reinvention. It’s a redraw.
Where this sits vs. Angles, Comedown Machine, and The Voidz
The reference points here are not Is This It or Room on Fire. Critics have connected the song to Casablancas’ work in The Voidz and to later Strokes material off Angles and The New Abnormal.
My own listening notes: track the guitar phrasing in the intro and you can hear the Angles-era experimentation, especially around the ‘Machu Picchu’ zone. But there are also moments closer in humidity to Comedown Machine (2013). The Michigan Daily hit on this too — the single reminds them of the band’s fifth album Comedown Machine and of Casablancas’ other band The Voidz, drawing on synth-pop and a strange strain of surf-rock, and sounding like The Strokes enjoying themselves.
Here’s why that matters. Comedown Machine was the most divisive Strokes album in real time. Returning to that zone — or revisiting it — isn’t just nostalgia. It reads more like the band walking back into the room where they half-committed a decade ago, this time with Rick Rubin, and finishing the thought. The band’s internal clock doesn’t run in a straight line. It spirals.
How it actually gets listened to
Something about this song doesn’t stretch out at night. That old Strokes function — the 4 a.m. bar song — isn’t in here. It’s more of a weekday afternoon song. The kind of thing you notice as background while you’re outside, drifting past a shop window. Mid-tempo, clean guitars, that satirical mantra on loop, all of it built around the atmosphere of the act of shopping.
So when fans say they’ve got it on repeat, my hunch is the repeat is a different kind of repeat than early-era Strokes. Back then, replaying the songs meant revisiting the heat. This one gets replayed as background texture for daily life. I’m not going to insist on that read, but the song seems designed to allow it.
To be fair to the negative view: NME noted that you can’t easily slot this sound into any of The Strokes’ previous six albums, and that outside of the closing guitar solo, it lacks bite and staying power. That’s a valid call. If you want the heat of the early records, this song will feel thin. If you can use “thin” as a feature, it opens up a new drawer for the band. This is a listener-side split, and there’s no correct answer.
Where it sits on Reality Awaits
Beyond the single, it’s worth thinking about where this song sits inside the album. The producer is Rick Rubin, Reality Awaits is the band’s seventh album, and the full tracklist has 9 new songs. Nine tracks, 41 minutes. That’s short. It’s the opposite of the maximalist album trend of the last few years.
The singles are ‘Going Shopping’ (April 7, 2026) followed by ‘Falling out of Love’ (May 13, 2026). The existence of that second single already tells you ‘Going Shopping’ isn’t meant to be the album’s only calling card. If the lead is about consumption and distance, the second title points somewhere emotionally different. Read together, that suggests the album isn’t going to be painted in a single mood — it’s arranging different kinds of distance next to each other.
Rubin’s presence matters too. What often happens on Rubin records is a re-centering — pulling off the overdubs, letting you hear five people in one room. That the Auto-Tune is so pronounced on ‘Going Shopping’ looks like it contradicts that. But it might be that Casablancas’ voice is being treated as one more instrument inside the room rather than the lead character standing above it. If so, that’s a different kind of unity. That’s the read I want to test against the full album.
How do you listen to a song people disagree about?
Honestly, the verdict on this one is still moving. The Crimson leaned positive overall. NME and Cult Following were sharper. Fan reviews are all over the place. When a band’s history gets this long and the weight of expectation gets this heavy, a six-year-later comeback song offering a “new sense of distance” is never going to land in one shape.
The question I’d put to fans is this: how do you shelve the heat that early Strokes gave you next to the distance the current Strokes is giving you? If you want both from the same song, ‘Going Shopping’ will feel like a shrug. Told to pick one, most people would go with the heat. But if you can put them on separate shelves, this song’s function changes depending on where you keep it. That’s work the listener has to do. The band, I think, handed us the empty space on purpose.
What to listen for, and where to go next
Three things to catch
- The closing guitar solo. In a song designed to feel deliberately thin, the last guitar passage is the one moment that pushes forward with real heat. Even NME singled it out. That contrast is the key to reading the song’s design.
- The vocal treatment debate. Do you hear the Auto-Tune as an unwelcome coat of paint, or as a device that lines up with the theme of a hollow consumer mantra? Which side you land on changes the whole shape of the track.
- The muted guitars. Clean but slightly dampened. That half-step-back texture is probably tied to both the Costa Rica setting and Rubin’s subtractive approach.
An entry route for new listeners
If ‘Going Shopping’ is your first Strokes song, work backwards. Start with The New Abnormal (2020) as a full listen. That’s the starting point for the current version of this band, and a lot of what ‘Going Shopping’ feels like is an extension of that record. From there, go further back to Comedown Machine (2013). Multiple reviewers named it as a reference point for the new song, and revisiting that divisive record now is honestly its own experiment. The Voidz material is worth checking too as background on where Casablancas’ vocal thinking is these days.
The wider frame — 2000s NYC rock, twenty-five years on
Zoom out for a second. 2001’s Is This It pulled up a whole New York scene — Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio — and that’s now twenty-five years ago. Listeners who were in college for that record are in their mid-forties, and the early Strokes albums are locked in a specific shelf: the classic-of-my-youth shelf. That shelf has gravity. Every new Strokes song gets pulled back toward it and evaluated in that light.
‘Going Shopping’ is carrying that gravity. Because the first three albums hit so hard, every later song ends up discussed with a “compared to the early stuff” caveat. That’s a real creative constraint. So the band has spent the last decade quite deliberately not repeating the old format. Read the heavier Auto-Tune this time as an extension of that same strategy and it starts to make sense. Not a revival. A conversion. Of course opinion splits on it — that’s what happens when a band chooses conversion over revival.
What’s interesting is where their peers landed. Interpol and Yeah Yeah Yeahs have both released newer records in recent years, and both are moving away from their early clichés. ‘Going Shopping’ — a flat vocal singing through the fog of consumer life — reads like The Strokes’ own answer to a shared generational question: how do you update the romanticism you started with?
Closing — an update in distance, not a return to fire
‘Going Shopping’ isn’t going to sit next to The Strokes’ best moments. If that’s what you’re listening for, this will disappoint. But the fact that this band, in 2026, after six years of silence, chose this as the first song out of a Costa Rica session with Rick Rubin — that carries meaning. Consumption and distance. Mantra and satire. Auto-Tune as a device. Whether all of those choices completely land is another question. What they’ve done is put out the distance they want to hold right now. Whether you accept that offer is on you. I’ll be sitting with the full album before I lock in a verdict on this one. It’s too early to close the case on one song.
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